


Unfixed

by orchidbreezefc



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Angst, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Post-Game(s), Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-01-25 21:23:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12541516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchidbreezefc/pseuds/orchidbreezefc
Summary: Even if everyone does wake up after the Neo World Program, something as traumatic as a killing game doesn't just go away. In this world, everything has consequences, and making it out alive doesn't make it any easier.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I'm still mad about the anime where everyone turned out alive, happy, and perfectly unscathed from the game, not to mention unchanged from years of despair. Yes, I'm writing SDR2 fic halfway through watching NDRV3. And no, I don't know where I'm going with this.
> 
> This fic will use parts of the anime and ignore others completely at my discretion, just as the lord intended.
> 
> Warnings for self-harm and disordered eating--Akane was the long-haired person who starved herself and you can take that headcanon from my _cold, dead hands_. I plan to get heavy and stay heavy with this fic, to the best of my ability, so we'll see how it goes. More tags will be added as they become relevant.

It feels like it would be too obvious, redundant even, to say it, but after Hinata escapes the game, everything is different.

The islands are different; in real life they're expansive, dwarfing the amenities on them. There are real animals and bugs; Hinata feels like he gets a new mosquito bite every time he even thinks about going outside. Food doesn't just appear, perfectly-made and tasting exactly as it should--something the students really should have thought about more before all the mysteries were spoon-fed to them. There are other people there, too; only Future Foundation staff, but real people nonetheless.

But more than that, the survivors of the Neo World Program wake up in different bodies. There are changes, scars that weren't there before, from battles as despair and from themselves. Hinata keeps seeing the lines on his arms and remembering the feeling of them. He remembers feeling that in those moments, anything would have been preferable to the fucking apathy, so why the hell not, right?

No matter how horrible Hinata had ever felt about himself—and he has, has felt crushing, grinding fury and helplessness at the worthless person he was unlucky enough to be born as—he had never considered doing something like that before. His hands shake when he thinks about how naturally it had come to him when he was despair.

The others notice the scars, he’s sure, but they have memories of him with them, so it’s impossible to act as if they’ve noticed for the first time. He doesn’t blame them, because of course it’s the same when he looks at them, and he doesn’t know what to do about it either. 

Even after Souda complains about the buzzcut he had given himself, it's hard to bring up the burns reddening his skin like they’re new, rather than something clear to everyone even in the short time he’d met them as despair. There’s no way Hinata could say anything about Owari’s clothes that hang off her frame from years of self-imposed starvation, when in the game it seemed she might burst out of them at any moment. He could never talk to Kuzuryu about his height or the maturity of his face, let alone the scars on it.

Hinata’s body is similarly post-pubescent by now, none of the lanky, awkward teenager that he’s used to being. Maybe it should make him more comfortable in his skin, more confident, but it does the opposite—like he’s a stranger usurping someone else's life. 

He expected to gradually get used to it, but the feeling only grows in the hours and days he’s awake. There's an itch in his brain, a shadow over his psyche that can't be explained by just memories. Maybe the rehabilitation wasn’t fully successful for him. Maybe he’s still in despair. Maybe this is what that feels like; he should know what it feels like, theoretically, should remember, but the memories feel so distant. Like they’re not really his. Like they belong to someone else.

All five survivors, in their status meetings and check-ups by the Future Foundation, have reported that their consciousnesses are different. Naegi explains personally to them that it's to be expected; even with their personalities successfully rehabilitated from the game, they have to reconcile years of memories of being despair. 

Yet it seems like more than that for Hinata. He keeps thinking about the moment he woke in a hospital bed, having been transported from the pods after brain activity was confirmed. Naegi and Togami, who hadn't been under for as long and were already awake and rehabilitated by the time Hinata woke, were there to greet him. Practically the moment Hinata was conscious, Naegi was touching his shoulder and beaming and saying over and over just how proud he was of all of them.

Then Togami cut him off with a hand held up and fixed Hinata with his traditional cold stare. "Are we speaking to Hajime Hinata, or Izuru Kamukura?"

The answer had been Hajime Hinata, of course.

Definitely.

By the time Hinata is granted daytime leave of the hospital--thank God--he’s more than tired of dealing with the hair. He trades haircuts with Owari, who also found herself swimming in hair after waking. Something makes him stop her from cutting it all the way down to where it was before. He asks her to leave it around his shoulders, and she shrugs and complies; “Easier that way, anyway.” 

Her work is messy, but Hinata doesn’t mind—by contrast, they're both surprised at how neat Owari's hair turns out. She makes a joke about how his talent might be hairdressing, just like she might have before Komaeda had found the files. Then they remember she might not be too far off. 

It’s funny, that a thing like that would be what tips Hinata off. He goes back to the hospital, where they’re still monitoring him at night--they refuse to give him a cottage, or even a room at the motel, which he'd happily take just to be out of the damn place. Instead of sleeping, he spends hours alternately staring at his hands and toying with strands of hair, ones he left by choice. Or was it his choice? He can identify it now, the shadow on his mind, if he concentrates. There’s no mistaking Kamukura’s presence. 

It feels ridiculous to ask his own mind questions, but Hinata tries reaching out to him anyway. _Kamukura_? he asks tentatively. There is no real response, but Hinata gets a sensation like he’s being watched: the itch in his brain from before, perhaps.

Is Kamukura really alive in there? Is he a shell of himself, some figment of Hinata’s mind, a lingering after-image of what he once was? Or is he there, full strength, waiting for his moment? Can Kamukura hide his thoughts from Hinata, if he has any at all? Maybe he’s just biding his time in some corner of Hinata’s psyche. Maybe he’s planning something, some overthrow of Hinata’s consciousness, determined to return despair to this island and world.

Hinata looks in the bathroom mirror and touches his face. One eye is hazel, the other deep red. His hair is not short like Hajime Hinata’s, but not long like Izuru Kamukura’s.

What _is_ he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: the first non-survivor returns! ;0


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm almost done with NDRV3... wild stuff. I wrote a fic for it, but I need to finish the game to be sure my fic doesn't contradict anything in the last chapter. Stay tuned!!
> 
> Content warning in this chapter for restraining by doctors. Also more general warning, I do some funny stuff with past/present tense in this chapter. It's intentional! Please don't leave comments 'correcting' it. Not that you should ever comment just to correct stuff in fanfic. We do it as a hobby, guys.

The survivors and staff spent a solid week waiting for the other Remnants to show signs of brain activity. If they did wake, would they return as their rehabilitated avatars? Would they remember the game at all? Would they be despair, and if so, then what?

Hinata feels pretty dumb, in hindsight, for doing all that pondering and still failing to realize Komaeda would be the first to show signs of brain activity. Not everyone is a sure case, but trust Komaeda to be too lucky to die. Hinata feels even dumber for having been so excited to greet Komaeda after he really woke, just grateful that someone, anyone, proved death in the Neo World Program wasn’t permanent.

Hinata spent Komaeda’s whole move to the hospital wondering what to say to him. He had so many regrets, so many things that had run through his head after Komaeda died that he desperately wished he could have said. He would have to—get to—apologize, for everything, inside the game and out. But it was also vitally important to let Komaeda know Hinata was happy to have him alive and glad he was there, before he got a head start on the self-loathing.

There was the expectation of a wait between the move to the hospital and Komaeda waking, so it ended up being just Hinata and the Future Foundation medics most of the time. There were no promises as to how long it would take Komaeda to wake, if he did at all, but Hinata knew he could put his faith in his luck. Even if it signaled something terrible on the horizon, as Komaeda claimed it always did, Hinata trusted in the momentary good, and he would be there for it.

_Someone_ ought to be there. The other survivors were, at best, uninterested in seeing much of Komaeda, and at worst angry that it was him to wake first. Even Sonia declined to spend any more time in the room than the occasional visit to check on Hinata. She tactfully told him she thought it best that he be the one to greet Komaeda first, and chose not to elaborate.

It didn’t matter, though, that nobody else was eager to have someone like Komaeda back. Hinata was glad enough for all of them. He was so grateful that his—that Kamukura’s—actions hadn’t doomed the others forever. Komaeda had a second chance at life, and so might everyone else.

So, while the other survivors spent their time monitoring the pods and catching up on footage of the game, Hinata got used to waiting in the hospital, as much as he could get used to a place like that. It became routine to sit by Komaeda and read or play a game, occasionally talking to the medics or Togami, Kirigiri, and Naegi when they came around to visit.

Hinata became very familiar with the sight of Komaeda lying still over the next several days. He was weaker than the Komaeda Hinata knew in the game, several years more advanced in his illness. He managed to be even paler too, more visibly sunken-eyed even with them closed. But if his—if Kamukura’s—memory was anything to go by, no matter what cocktail of memories or personality Komaeda had when he woke, he was sure to be a handful. 

Still, while he slept, the hospital room was peaceful. Focusing on Komaeda's calm, resting face was almost enough to assuage the anxiety that rustled up and down Hinata’s back just from being in a hospital. It helped just to see him breathe: irrefutable proof that he was alive, that they didn’t all have to shoulder the responsibility for the permanent death of a friend. If Komaeda woke, then Hinata would get a second chance, too.

After a few days, the machines detected some sort of brainwave that apparently signaled Komaeda would wake soon. Too many medics bustled into the room—plus security, in case the Komaeda that woke wasn’t the one they were hoping for. At least everyone was reasonably sure it wouldn’t be Enoshima. They crowded Hinata in his chair at Komaeda’s side, but he hardly noticed through his roiling anticipation.

Hinata watched with bated breath as Komaeda stirred, creasing his brow like he was waking from a terrible dream. Slowly, his green-grey eyes fluttered open. The beeping of the machines sounded steadily in the place of Hinata’s failing heartbeat. Komaeda peered down at his right hand and left arm, laid neatly over the covers, and turned them over ponderously. Hinata opened his mouth to softly call his attention, but Komaeda didn’t even look around to see him there before he began to scream.

Hinata had never heard Komaeda scream before. Raise his voice to a delirious fever pitch, sure, but not just _scream_ , never a noise of such raw frustration and fury. All Hinata’s plans to express his joy at having Komaeda back went out the window. He stood up to try to do something, but Komaeda still didn’t take any notice of him and continued to howl. The Future Foundation medics pushed Hinata back away from the bed as Komaeda began to thrash and claw at all the devices he was hooked up to. 

Hinata stumbled out into the hallway, clutching his chest as if to match the constriction in it. What was going on? Why was Komaeda so _angry_? He didn’t understand. He doubled over in the hallway with his hands on his knees, trying to breathe. Panic bubbled up from his stomach, both squeezing his guts and boiling around them.

And then his body was no longer his. Well, that wasn’t true. It was his, but all at once he was seeing through different eyes, thinking through a different lens. It was like his mind was a spotlight and the color filter had been changed. His panic dulled down. Everything dulled down. _I’ll take care of this_ , he found himself thinking without planning to think it. _Calm down, Hajime._

There was no time to process. Kamukura shoved his way back into the room and caught the hand of a medic fumbling with a sedative as some others strap Komaeda down. He stared her down until she let go of the IV. “I’ll handle it,” said Hinata’s mouth in a voice that was not quite his own.

Komaeda finally seemed to realize Hinata was in the room, and paused his struggling to look around at him, eyes wild, chest heaving. His mouth fell slightly open and his eyes narrowed just a bit, like he was trying to figure something out. Hinata wanted to run away from that look. Kamukura didn’t oblige.

Kamukura set about undoing Komaeda’s restraints, ignoring security’s protests and pushing away their hands. “I said it’s handled,” he snapped, whipping around and yanking his arm away when one of them unwisely tried to grab him. “Leave.”

The medics retreated to the door to flutter nervously. The guards backed off, but did not leave, instead choosing to hover with their hands close to their batons and stun guns. Typical meatheads; trained right out of their fear responses.

Meanwhile, Komaeda sat up and rubbed his left arm where the straps were tied. “So far...” The familiar sound of his voice, naturally soft and breathy but with a poisonous edge, brought Hinata back to earth a little. “The afterlife is very hectic.”

Hinata blinked. He shifted his stance into something more comfortable for him, out of the perfect, commanding posture of Kamukura. Any other time he would sit down and have a good fucking freak-out session about that, but he had a more pressing matter. “Komaeda, you... you knew you were in the Neo World Program, didn’t you? This isn’t the afterlife. You’re back in the real world.”

Komaeda shook his head and took on the familiar, sardonic attitude where he seems to think Hinata doesn’t understand what he’s getting at. Maybe it was a reasonable attitude to have; Hinata rarely understands everything Komaeda means whenever he says anything. “No, this must be Hell,” said Komaeda through a tight smile. “I'm back here with all of you.”

Hinata feels dumbest of all now, faced with a realization: he was so looking forward to all of his classmates being alive and together that it had failed to occur to him that not everyone would see things the same way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's never how you imagine it, huh...?
> 
> Kamukura's voice is different from Hinata's, but not enough to sound like an entirely different person. It's pretty common for systems (people with '''multiple personalities''') to have a different cadence or pitch from member to member. Even different accents, sometimes!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finished SDR2 and have been watching DR3 with my brother, so I'm doing this again. Also got around to watching the Komaeda OVA. Wild stuff. Kind of a gap-filler for the same problems I'm addressing with this fic, but I like my version better anyway, so have some more of it.

Hinata can feel barbs on the silence that spreads between them.

_Being with us is hell?_ No. Hinata can’t unpack that just yet. First he has to deal with the memories of the malice Komaeda held in his last days, rising up from behind the wall of false hope Hinata had hidden them with. Now he's left with the person before him, older and weaker but still exuding that malice from tumultuous grey eyes. It's terrifying. Hinata wonders where all the confidence he had as Kamukura evaporated to, and then regrets wondering when he feels that itching sensation in his brain once more.

"It's... Komaeda... you’re just out of the Neo World Program. I thought you knew what was going on from the files."

“Evidently not,” Komaeda says with his light, sarcastic smile, spreading his arms. “Seeing as I’m still here somehow."

“I thought...” Hinata pauses to recalibrate his clearly already-failing brain. “You knew from the files that we had our memories wiped by the Future Foundation. They really didn’t say anything about the virtual reality?”

“Virtual reality?” Komaeda’s eyes widen, but just a little, not in the comically exaggerated overly-innocent way they do when he’s being insincere. “So when you said ‘real world’...” He stares down at his left arm. “Yes, that explains this.” He waves it vaguely to highlight it, as if Hinata could possibly have forgotten it. “Ah, and of course how you are,” he adds, gesturing generally toward Hinata’s face.

Hinata freezes. Does Komaeda know about Kamukura? That is, of course he knows about him, he met him, but surely he doesn’t know he’s still there. How could he? No, Hinata’s just being paranoid. Komaeda’s just talking about the eyes and the hair. Surely.

“Yeah,” he stammers. “This is what we’re like in the real world. The killing game was our consciousnesses from several years ago uploaded into a virtual reality. l really thought you knew.”

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t have believed something so... science fiction. It wouldn’t be in Monokuma’s interest to put something like that in the file, knowing I'd be less likely to trust it.”

“Well,” says Hinata, with a familiar frustration he had almost forgotten, “it doesn’t matter if you believed it, because it’s true.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t have been any fun if I knew all the details, would it? Well, I can’t say I didn’t suspect something was going on beyond my understanding,” Komaeda says, crossing what’s left of his arms pensively. “Our ages didn’t seem to be correct, and some of us had been mutilated according to the files... I chalked it up to Monokuma’s interference, given his apparent power to do the impossible. If it wasn’t his doing, certainly it was nothing he was about to explain to me. And naturally,” he adds contemptuously, “I couldn't bring the mystery to any of you.”

All this time, the truth has been slowly dawning on Hinata, the terrible reality he would want to ignore or refuse to believe if he didn’t have so much experience by now of where that gets a person. Horror creeps chilly up his spine like the fingers of Komaeda’s grasping, discarded hand. “So if you really didn't know about the virtual reality," he says slowly, fighting the urge to never ask the question on his lips and bury it forever, "then you... you thought you were going to die in real life?”

Komaeda snorts, some mix of dark amusement and disbelief. “Obviously. That’s why I did it. I certainly didn’t think I’d be waking up stuck with this horrible thing--" He lifts his arm again, still a deeply unnecessary gesture--"a weaker body, a head full of memories, and of course _you_ people. Why did you think I was so upset to wake up? I failed.”

Hinata wants to say he doesn’t understand. Maybe he would be able to say that if he had a brain without Kamukura’s memories, a body without Kamukura’s scars. “So you really wanted to kill yourself?”

“Do try and keep up with the conversation. There’s something more important than that, anyway,” Komaeda says dismissively, though Hinata can’t think of anything that could possibly be more important than Komaeda killing himself for real. Komaeda looks at him with dangerously glinting eyes. “Who was the traitor? Did they live?”

_Nanami_. The loss Hinata has tried to live with in the several weeks since the killing game splits his chest wide open. He opens his mouth to try to explain—where does he begin?

That's when Miaya Gekkogahara wheels in. An image of Usami peeking over a wall, sweating profusely, is on the screen in front of her motorized wheelchair. “Is Komaeda there? Are you all okay? How did everything go?”

Komaeda's nose wrinkles at the sound of that sugary voice. "Don't tell me that's that horrible rabbit again. And you're trying to tell me this isn't hell?" He sits up a little in his bed to look up from the attention-grabbing cartoon to the person controlling her. "Who's this?"

“This is Miaya Gekkogahara, one of the Observers from the Future Foundation,” Hinata explains, having seen her for many check-up sessions in which he had conveniently forgotten to mention his problem with Kamukura. “She's the Super High School Level Therapist, a creator of the Neo World Program, and the person who came up with Usami.”

“A dubious distinction to be sure,” Komaeda says in what is apparently his favorite tone: light and venomous.

“Oh... how cruel,” Gekkogahara says through the screen. Usami holds her ears down, eyes forming beady tears. “But if you remember me from your school trip, then the rehabilitation worked... that’s wonderful!” Usami straightens up again, back to brightness. _This is why we all hated her, Gekkogahara,_ Hinata thinks exhaustedly. “That’s cause for celebration!”

“Rehabilitation?” Komaeda frowns, a crease of perhaps genuine distress appearing in his brow. “Yes—yes, of course. That was the goal of wiping our memories. To cure us of despair.” His uneasiness twists into a cynical smile. Hinata’s starting to get really sick of that insincere face of his. “And here I thought that was just a fun addition to the torture game. Make us kill sooner, add a touch of dramatic irony.”

“All that awful killing wasn’t planned, Komaeda! Oh, no, no, no! We would never! Perish the thought!” Usami wrings her little paws over her magic stick. “That was a terrible virus put in the game to ruin your school trip of friendship!”

Komaeda frowns. “A virus. Put in the game intentionally. So the killing game was someone’s plan to interfere with our recovery from despair? The true mastermind.”

Hinata stands stock still, caught off guard by the ease with which Komaeda came to the correct conclusion. The true mastermind—what can Hinata say about that? Should he just admit to introducing the virus? Is it really his fault at all? Should Kamukura own up to it, and if he doesn’t, should Hinata do so in his place?

Komaeda smells Hinata’s distress like a bloodhound. He turns to him with vicious curiosity alive in his eyes.

“It was Nanami,” Hinata blurts out in a wild effort to buy more time. He immediately regrets betraying her to Komaeda’s cruelty, but it’s too late. “The traitor, I mean,” he clarifies reluctantly.

“Nanami,” Komaeda breathes. He closes his eyes. “I should have known.” He opens his eyes again. “And, what? My plan failed and you all solved my suicide puzzle, it seems, so she must have been executed in the program. But shouldn’t she be awake now if I am? Does she merely have better things to do than waste time greeting a wretch like me?”

_Everyone else seems to,_ Hinata almost says, not sure if it would be biting back against Komaeda’s nasty attitude or a quick way to avoid an explanation. Or it could simply be the pain making him want to lash out. Hell, if he wanted to do that, he could say he wishes he weren’t wasting his time with Komaeda right now, but that wouldn’t be true. Not completely.

“Maybe the rehabilitation didn’t work for you the way it did with the survivors,” Gekkogahara worries; Usami puts her paws to her mouth in concern. “Don’t you remember Nanami from your school life, Komaeda? Have you lost those memories?”

_Or are you just playing dumb and drawing out the explanation so it hurts more?_ Hinata wonders.

Komaeda thinks carefully, or pretends to. “Now that I think about it—ah yes. How could I forget the brutal murder of our beloved class representative?” He goes to clasp his hands, then seems to remember the problem with that and stops halfway. His eyes are beatific and reverent enough to make up for it. “The tragic despair of loss that brought us closer to a shining—“

“Don’t,” Hinata growls. “Don’t do your shitty routine, all right? Not with her. She died protecting us. She cared so much about all of us. You don’t even know what she—”

“ _All_ of us?” Komaeda interrupts, that awful smile frozen on his face. “I hardly think so. Not the Nanami in my school memories—the real one, I take it?” Hinata flinches and is unable to reply before Komaeda continues. “What a talented girl she was. Very protective of her classmates—the people in the Main Course, those who shared in her talent and successes—“

“Komaeda!” Gekkogahara cries through Usami, possibly the first time she has done anything befitting of a teacher.

“—Other than me, that is, who was unfit to lick her shoes,” Komaeda finishes, with the satisfied look of someone who has already completed his goal.

Hinata’s hands shake no matter how much he tightens them further into fists. _She was real,_ he wants to say. _She cared._ But even if he could find the will to say it, he couldn’t bear to hear the next nasty, calculated thing Komaeda would say about her.

The medics take this opportunity to push past Hinata and begin to take some kind of measurements from Komaeda. Hinata hopes the flurry of activity masks the movement of him wiping his eyes.

"You deal with it for a while, Gekkogahara," he mumbles, and Usami stands to attention and salutes.

"Ah," Komaeda says, straining to see Hinata around the other bodies now separating them. “At least let me say goodbye. It was so nice to have a real visitor in the hospital for once.”

Hinata says nothing, but despite himself he looks back, and as he opens the door to leave he makes eye contact with Komaeda. Those eyes are deep and hypnotic, and Hinata can't read the emotion that makes them narrow slightly.

“Goodbye. It was good to see you again, Kamukura.”

Hinata freezes halfway through the threshold, and then, fittingly, it's Kamukura who takes the other step through and slams the door behind him.


End file.
